In capacitor production, power and ground electrodes may be screen printed onto ceramic and interleaved in a stack. The power electrodes may be connected to a power terminal or multiple power terminals and the ground electrodes may be connected to a ground terminal or multiple ground terminals.
FIGS. 1A–1C illustrate top-down views of a prior art apparatus. FIG. 1A illustrates an electrode layer 101 including an electrode 110 and tabs 111 formed on ceramic 100. FIG. 1B illustrates an electrode layer 102 including electrode 120 and tabs 122 formed on ceramic 100. Several electrode layers 101, 102 (from a few to hundreds) may be alternated and arranged to form a stack 103 as illustrated in FIG. 1C. In FIG. 1C, ceramic 100 is hidden with its outline shown by a dashed line for the purpose of clarity. Tabs 111, 122 may facilitate connection to terminals 131, 132, respectively. Terminals 131, 132 may be positive and negative terminals or power and ground terminals. The terminals may be connected to a circuit such as on a printed circuit board (PCB) or similar electrical system. Stack 103 may illustrate the arrangement of a typical 8 terminal capacitor stack.
The capacitance (C) of the capacitor formed in such a manner may be proportional to the number of electrode layers (N) in the stack, C=N×Clayer, where Clayer is the capacitance per electrode layer. The electrical resistance (R) of the capacitor may be inversely proportional to the number of electrode layers in the stack,
      R    =                  R        layer            N        ,where Rlayer is the resistance per electrode layer. Therefore, the capacitance and resistance cannot be separately controlled by choosing the number of electrodes in the stack.